Reading Rambo

Isn't the internet wonderful? At least for recommending things. I had people I've never talked to before (yes, I consider commenting 'talking') suggest scary/mysterious/generally unsettling things to read, and thereby helped me overcome something of my Horror Genre Idiocy.
Everyone's suggestions got me very excited about getting new things to read, so I went to the Chicago Public Library directly after work, picked up We Have Always Lived in the Castle, marched over to the 'L' section of the broadly-termed 'FICTION' category and! -- discovered there was no H.P. Lovecraft. Well, that's not entirely true. There were two books of Lovecraft "revisions." Yeah, they decided to assemble two collections of stories Lovecraft helped revise. But they had nothing -- NOTHING -- that was just him.
Thinking I might be in the wrong section -- maybe short stories all by one author were in another area? -- I walked up to the Reference librarian, somethin…

Yeah, I'm the heroine here. Because it's my blog, damnit. And I'm 5'2" and spunky, which we all know is perfect heroine material.
Anyway, this weekend has been surprisingly awesome so far. And I'm going to tell you all about some pretty great things that you should be aware of in order to lead a happier, more fulfilled life.
1. Tig Notaro is hilarious. Like...you don't even know. Unless you've heard her new standup album, in which case right now you're shouting "OMG I KNOW. I KNOW. AMAZING." It was rec'd on twitter, and I clicked on it right before bed, being like 'Eh, sure, I'll check this out.' Look, just go here. It's an mp3 of one of the tracks. You will laugh and then be a happier person.
2. The Sarah Silverman Program is on Netflix Instant, and — hey! HEY. I saw that dismissive look. No. You watch it and you laugh. I've spent the parts of my Saturday that weren't spent trudging around Chicago eating ice crea…

I enjoy quests. They liven up the otherwise repetitive and generally boring Chicago-in-winter atmosphere. Quests in summer are fun too, as one can go more places without feeling like the elements are waging war on humanity and you, yes you, have been especially targeted, but there's more to do in summer and they thus lose some of their specialness.

My latest quest -- and I should warn you in advance, it has no happy questy ending -- began on a whim, as all my quests do. I decided, one day last week at work, that I wanted to read at least the first of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy (it's now much more than a trilogy, but that's beside the point). It seemed delightfully trashy, and I've been reading too much serious stuff. So off I went to check the Chicago Public Library's website. Do they have the first one? No. They had, what I would encounter again and again on my travels and soon consider to be something along the lines of "the Gorgon impeding my pat…